on doing All the Things.

Birthday : Goals

photo of yours truly by the mr, scott eric johnson

For the past few years I’ve been doing a year in review .pdf thing courtesy of Marcus Buckingham after I read one of his books and signed up for his mailing list. (It’s the only thing I’ve ever gotten from his mailing list, and it has just now occurred to me that I hope tons of good stuff hasn’t been trapped in a spam filter or something.)

Essentially you write down the highs and lows of the past year, what you learned, what your goals are for the coming year and how you plan to achieve them.

Because I’m a procrastinator, doing this exercise gets later and later every year, and has now settled around my birthday, which I think is as good a time as any. My outlook on the prior year has gelled, and I have a decent stock of where I am and what I can get done in the next 8 months. Sometimes my goals are Mondo Beyondo level unrealistic and others have been downright manageable.

In an unprecedented move of transparency, this year I’ve decided to share some of them.

Here are the juicy ones:

1) Create business plan, packages, website and take on 1 new client.Now that I’ll be working from home and the proud owner of an extra 10 hours of time a week, I’ve decided I want to officially brand myself as a business manager, and reach out to creative solopreneurs and tiny businesses who are finding they can no longer do it all themselves and need administrative and strategic help, but aren’t ready to commit to hiring “staff”.

2. Focus on Honeymoon Diaries as a blog people might actually read, and/or as a potential business or stepping stone to other career opportunities.Here’s the thing. I’d like my work to entail looking at photos of hotels all day. Yes, this sounds like a ridiculous thing to do for a living, but there are lots of bloggers and others doing ridiculous things for money, so why shouldn’t I be one of them? And yes, asking the universe for this scares the crap out of me for several reasons. Mostly because I don’t do well with good things happening to me, and so I can’t handle or imagine how GOOD it would be. How happy PLAYING in the world of pretty travel dreams makes me. Happy like a little kid happy. Summer mornings happy. Even though I’m now putting it out there for the world to see, I can’t imagine actually letting myself want this, this thing that I already do day in and day out, at least when I’m not actively avoiding the things that make me happy. (Which is a big issue for another post and possibly a therapist.) At the very least, if Jetsetter’s recent Pinterest contest showed Aimee and I anything, it’s that we’re not the only ones that want to look at travel photos all day.

3. Continue taking acting classes and find out what it is I’d have to do to do more with it:Well this is a BIG and SCARY one. Perhaps the biggest and the scariest. The thing is, I like acting. A lot. I’d like to see what it’d be like to do more of it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, except the little voice that’s told me since childhood that the bananas-ness of “being an actor” is so, well, bananas, that I might as well not bother. Except that I have started bothering and all I want to do is see what it would be like to do a teensy bit more, so that stupid voice can shut the fuck up right now.

4. Write article about orphans and investing. Look into whether there are any personal finances blogs or components of personal finance blogs for high school and college kids out there. Get involved.This is a good one, in two parts. See, I’ve been really into $$$ this year, and specifically I’ve been thinking about how us young adult orphans react to investing for retirement. When, you know, we saw our parents not make it to retirement. This feels like a real article, meant for somewhere bigger than this blog. And thusly, I’d like to make it so. And then keep that ball rolling.

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So that dear readers, are my big scary goals for 29. I should probably try to have some fun in there too.